Miami apartment death toll rises to 78 as recovery reaches 16th day | Miami apartment collapse

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The death toll in a Miami-area apartment building collapse rose to 78 on Friday, a number the mayor called “heartbreaking” and “staggering” as rescuers toiled for a 16th day to find victims under the rubble.

Another 62 people are still missing. No one has been found alive since the early hours after the building fell on June 24.

Miami-Dade Mayor Daniela Levine Cava said work to recover victims is continuing urgently.

“This is an astonishing and heartbreaking number and it affects us all deeply,” she said of the new death toll.

On Thursday, Paraguay’s Foreign Minister said in a radio report that the body of the sister of the country’s first lady was among the bodies found. Several Latin Americans were reported to be in the building when it collapsed. Rescue workers are now focused on finding the remains rather than the survivors, who have vowed to continue their search for victims until they have cleared all the debris at the site.

The grueling search for survivors turned into recovery efforts at midnight on Wednesday after authorities said they came to the excruciating conclusion that there was “no chance of life” under the rubble of the Champlain Towers South apartment building in Surfside.

Hope of finding survivors was briefly revived after workers demolished what remained of the building, allowing access to new areas of debris. There are some voids where survivors could have been trapped, mostly in the basement and parking garage, but no one has been found alive. Instead, the teams recovered more than a dozen additional victims.

No one has been pulled out alive since the early hours after the 12-storey building collapsed on June 24.

State and local officials pledged financial aid to the families of the victims, as well as to the residents of the building who survived and lost all of their possessions.

Meanwhile, authorities are opening a grand jury investigation into the breakdown. The families have filed at least six lawsuits.

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